This is a contentious argument to venture during an Ashes summer, but it’s worth hearing – and ready made for discussion in the Test Match Special lunch slot. Cricket bloggers Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber’s conversations with players, analysts and administrators frequently return to one topic: the vast schism opening up between the game’s haves (England, Australia and India, pocketing the TV rights) and have-nots.
A season’s worth of stories – the IPL, Allen Stanford, internal ICC politics – find themselves squeezed into a single session, yet Collins and Kimber obtain revealing interactions with cricketing powerbrokers (bluff ECB suit Giles Clarke, guarded IPL kingmaker Lalit Modi) and the gathering clouds never quite obscure the filmmakers’ evident love of the game.
They know the Twenty20 format provides plentiful cinematic spectacle, but even these editorial positions are symptomatic of a wider institutional crisis, where the Boycott-slow matter of grassroots development is valued far less than cold, hard cash-in-hand.
